Catherine went to Action Press this afternoon to get a colour copy made.  Their colour copier was busy, so they sent her across to the Dominion Building (aka “the old Post Office” / aka “where all those DVA people work”) and the Commissionaire there led her down a hall to ePrintIt’s Charlottetown office.

They made her copies, but seemed confused as to how much to charge her.  She said “I have three dollars.”  That seemed to make them happy, and they took her $3 and that was that.

Looking at their website, their quite technically sophisticated, and can accept documents for printing over the web.

Catherine Hennessey

Or rather she does have one, but it was built in 1972, weighs about 75 pounds, and doesn’t fit into her aesthetic.  I think she stores it in the barn at Cranberry Wharf.

Tonight the Discovery Channel is showing a documentary on the Hillsborough River, and Catherine wants a tape of it.  We have a VCR, and so she asked me to record it. 

She dropped off a theoretically blank tape in our vestibule this afternoon, and then left a phone message later on: “you might want to check that tape I left, I think there might be something on it.” 

It turns out that the “something” was “only” the tape of her induction into the Order of Canada last July.

We’re on the way to Shopper’s Drug Mart to buy a new blank tape.

I thought of that today when I received tip to check out this GPS Drawing website from Maggie, the Internet Editor at The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

I am of the fortunate age to have learned a trade that is now, for all intents and purposes, obselete: manual paste-up.

When I worked at the Peterborough Examiner, I was a member of a team of 8 or 9 people who, every day, took typeset stories that spewed out of CompuGraphic typesetter on 4 inch wide rolls of photographic paper, trimmed them, applied hot wax to the back, and pasted the stories in the right place on a layout sheet the same size as the final paper.  This process is well illustrated on the Cal State Fullerton website

The resulting sheet was then mounted on a platform and a full-size picture taken of it with a large wall-mounted camera.  The negative was then sent down a special chute to the pressroom where a 3D plate was made on a platemaker, and the plate went on the press and a paper was produced.

In the modern post-paste-up world, when you want to colour a box of text green, you just click on “green” on your computer, select the paint tool, and woosh, it’s green.  Takes what, maybe 1 or 2 seconds tops.

Back at the Examiner, if we needed to colour a part of the newspaper a different colour, we needed to use something called rubylith.

Basically what we would do is to take a sheet of ruby — which is just a sticky red film and use an Olfa knife to cut out a piece the size of the different coloured splotch in the paper.  We’d then tape this ruby onto a clear plastic sheet the size of a newspaper page, and used some alignment holes punched in both the plastic sheet and the newspaper page in question, enure that the two were aligned.

Next we’d shoot two negatives, one of the actual page and one of the plastic sheet with the rubylith, and sent both negatives to the press room, where two plates would get made, one for colour and one for black.

Once you got good at it, you could do all this in, say, 10 minutes. 

A lot of work to make a red line under the Sears logo, or to make the Farm Boy grocery store have a green border.

I assume that there are still places in the world where my manual paste-up skills would be of use.  But not many.  Newspapers are created on Macintosh computers now, and I’d be willing to bet that if you showed up at the Guardian looking to borrow some rubylith they might have to look hard for it.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled era.

Oh, by the way, Oliver: I love you. 

There are some families you can’t escape. 

For a while it seemed I couldn’t turn around without having a Reddin sister involved in my life: one is married to Kevin, another recruited me to speak at a dieticians conference, and yet another is a member of the PEI Crafts Council.  You can also count Reddin mother (a well-regarded home economist who helped me on a project when we first moved here) and Reddin brother (who was the NDP candidate in our district a few elections back).  And I think he’s the same brother who used to be married to the woman who contracted with Catherine to construct a sculptural sign for her translation business, but that might be another brother still.

Then it was the MacEacherns.  First came Frank, who I met through Catherine Hennesey by virtue of his work in GIS.  Then Frank’s brother in law Derek became my accountant.  Then another brother, Dave, contacted me about doing a website for him.  Then Derek (the accountant) and his wife Bonnie (the MacEachern) moved across the street from Alf Hennessey (the former Mr. Catherine Hennessey) where something of a neighbourly pesticide battle ensued.  The final connection here is that Frank used to be in business with Percy Simmons; later Percy went to work with Cam Beck (who used to work for Scott Linkletter, who I later worked for) and Cam then went on to facilitate a Jive Kings Conference I attended (see below).

Now it’s the Nicholsons. 

Susan is married to Perry Williams, who I met first because he was teaching computers to junior school students, second because we always ended up going to the same auction sales, third because he lives up the road from Barrett & MacKay, and finally because we hired him at the Land Trust to put together a CD for us.  When Oliver was born, Susan arranged for us to borrow an infant car seat from her sister.  Her sister turned out to be Sandy Nicholson, who, among many other things, lives off the grid in De Sable, is married to Dale Sorenen (who plays trombone, but is not in the Jive Kings), and who met Catherine and Oliver through a La Leche League meeting here in Charlottetown.  Sandy is also involved in the Doula Association of PEI with Sylvie Aresnault, who was our doula. Following on, there is Bob Nicholson, who oddly enough also plays trombone (and is in the Jive Kings), and who currently lives in the house formerly owned and occupied by Catherine Hennessey.  I met Bob at a big Jive Kings Conference last year.

If you really want to get funky, follow this trail: Sandy and Sylvie are both doulas.  Sylvie also does bookkeeping work for Peter Lux at ECHO.  Peter Lux used to fish down east and it’s from those days that he knows Ann Thurlow.  Ann Thurlow used to work at the CBC.  Mac Campbell also used to work at the CBC.  Mac Campbell is now working with Perry Williams on video projects.  Perry is married to Susan who is sister of Sandy.  Now start at the beginning of this paragraph to loop through again.

I fully suspect that there are other Nicholson’s out there.  And I’m placing even odds on Oliver and Riley (daughter of Sandy and Dale) meeting in a smoky bar in Hong Kong in 25 years, falling in love and getting married.  And then only figuring out their connectness early in their lives.

Columnist Jerry Pournelle, who I’ve been reading in BYTE magazine since I was 12 years old, has written thousands of words on this very subject over the years: he started writing using a program called Electric Pencil and has never really been satisfied since.

Last night, in another fit of procrastination, and feeling like I didn’t want to write anything here because I just couldn’t bear to scratch out another word in the stone, I decided to do something about it.  The result is what you see a little thumbnail of to the right.  It’s not perfect, and it only works, at least so far, in Internet Explorer version 5 or higher.  But boy does it ever make writing for the web more pleasant.

What I did is to take something called the Rich Edit Component, released for free by a bunch called WebFX, and built a little custom text editor around it.  The result — call it RukEdit for now — lets me type into a web page in a WYSIWYG style. I’ve been able to create a nice clean interface that suites me perfectly.  It makes writing very, very pleasant.

I was partly prompted to do this by Edward Greenspan, of all people.  Book Television is showing highlights of last years’s ideaCity conference in Toronto and during his session he showed pictures of the depressing suburban court houses in Toronto where he spends a lot of his courtroom time.  His thesis was that ugly courthouses resulted in poorer, or at least different justice.  It’s all about your surroundings, he held.

And I agree.

If you’ve got your own tool for web writing, and don’t mind a Microsoft lock-in browser-wise, it might be worthwhile to take a look at the Rich Edit Component to see what it can do for you.  I know that “real web people code in raw HTML,” but when you’re hands are starting to give out, and your brain is sick of looking at greater than and less than signs, it’s nice to retreat to the simplicity of a nice clean editor.

Well that was fast.  Last night I posted a page on the site that listed a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get rid of in a big spring cleaning effort.  Less that 12 hours later it’s all been sold.

I’ve been reading the tea leaves, and I’m betting that we’ll see the end of Island Tel (err Island Telecom, or whatever) as a brand in the next 3 to 6 months, being replaced entirely by Aliant.

The signs: friends have been called by pollsters on issue, the recorded operator message you get when you call 411 or make a calling card call says, at least some of the time, “Thank you for using Aliant Telecom” (it used to say “MT&T and Island Tel”), and the font size of “An Aliant Company” relative to the legacy company logos has been growing.